The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  “Stares in horror at what he’s done and, sobbing his heart out, dials the cops.”

  “It’s just that you try to figure out what happened.”

  “I know, Jake. I’m sorry. Everybody plays that particular game. That’s because we always want to know why. Not so much how and who and when. But why.”

  “Can I ask you something? Did you stop in your room before you came in to eat?”

  “No. I parked in front. The question implies I’ve been away from the place. So somebody has been trying to get me.”

  He looked uneasy. “Well, it’s Mr. Holton. He comes in off and on and he’s never any trouble. He’s a lawyer. He was here about five o’clock looking for you. He had two quick ones and he came back about quarter to six. He’d have some and then go looking for you and come back. I let him have more than I would somebody else, on account of he’s local and a good customer and he’s always treated me good. Well, he finally got mean and loud and I finally had to cut him off. From the way he walked out … maybe a half hour before you came in to eat … he could have passed out in his car by now. Or maybe he’s still on his feet and waiting for you by your room. He began telling me, toward the end, that he was going to whip your ass. Looking at you, I think maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to do, unless he sucker punched you, which he acted mad enough to do. I thought you might want to keep your eyes open on your way back to the room.”

  It earned him the change from a five for the one drink.

  I decided to walk around to 109 rather than drive, as I had planned. I went the long way around and moved onto the grass and kept out of the lights. I stopped and listened and looked and finally discerned a burly shadow standing near a tall shrub and leaning against the white motel wall. I reconstructed the memory of what he had done with the revolver when he got it back. He had shoved it into his belt on the left side, under his jacket, well over toward his hip, grip toward the middle, where he could reach it easily with his right hand. I squatted and figured out a plausible route and then pulled my shoes off and circled and ducked quickly and silently through two areas of light, and then crawled slowly and carefully on hands and knees into the shelter of the foliage just behind him and to his right. As I neared him I heard his bad case of hiccups, a steady solid rhythmic case, each one a strangled, muffled sound due to his effort to stay quiet enough to ambush me. From then on I made each move on the hiccup, a jerky progress as in the most ancient motion pictures. At last, unheard, I was on my hands and knees right behind him and slightly to his right, just where a large and obedient dog would be. I inched my knees closer and put my weight back and lifted both hands. On the next hiccup I snapped my hands out and grasped his heavy ankles and yanked his legs out from under him, giving enough of a twist so that he would land on his left side. As he landed I scrambled onto him, felt the checkered wooden grip, and yanked the revolver free and rolled across the grass with it and stood up.

  He pushed himself slowly to a sitting position, rolled up onto his knees, put his hands on the wall, and slowly stood up. He turned and put his back against the wall and shook his thick head.

  “Bassard,” he said thickly. “Dirry stud bassard.”

  “Settle down, Richard. I cured your hiccups.”

  He grunted and launched himself at me, swinging wildly while he was still too far away to punish anything but the humid night air. I ducked to the side and stuck a leg out and he went down heavily onto his face. And once again, with the painful slowness of a large damaged bug, he got himself up onto his feet, using a small tree as a prop.

  He turned around and located me. “Wages of sin,” he mumbled. “My lousy ideas. Memories. All worked up. I read it, you bassard. Made her sore at me, you tricky bassard. Kept her here and soft-talked her an’ pronged her, you lousy smart-ass.”

  And with a big effortful grunt he came at me again. As he got to me I dropped, squatting, fingertips on the grass. As he tripped and spilled over my back I came up swiftly and he did a half turn in the air and landed flat on his back. He stared at the sky, breathing hard. He coughed in a shallow gagging way.

  “Sick,” he said. “Gonna be sick.”

  I helped him roll over. He got onto hands and knees, crawled slowly and then stopped, braced, vomited in dreadful spasms.

  “So sick,” he moaned.

  I got him onto his feet, and with one arm across my shoulders, my arm around his clumsy waist, I got him into the room. Once in the bathroom he was sick again. I held his stupid head, then sat him on the closed lid of the toilet and swabbed the mud and vomit off him with a wet towel. He swayed, eyes half closed. “Loved that girl. Loved her. Lousy thing. I can’t stand it.” He opened his eyes and looked up at me. “Honest to God, I can’t stand it!”

  “We better get you home, Rick.”

  He thought that over and nodded. “Best thing. Bad shape. Who cares anymore? Janice doesn’t give a shit. Penny the only one cared. Gone. Some sumbitch killed her. Some crazy. Know it wasn’t you. Wish it had been you. Fix you good.”

  “Where do you live, Holton?”

  “Twenny-eight twenny, Forest Drive.”

  I got his car keys from him and the description of his car, and went around to the front and drove it back to the room. I went in and brought him out and helped him into the red convertible, and got behind the wheel. He muttered directions.

  When I had to stop for a light, he said, “Sorry I had to smack you around, McGee. You know how it is.”

  “Sure. I know how it is.”

  “Get it out of my system. Hated you. Shouldna layed my girl, my wonnerful freckly nurse-girl. But man to man, shit, if she wanned it, she wanned it, and why should you turn it down, huh? Great kid. Greatest piece of ass in the worl’. You’re a nice guy, McGee. I doan wanna like you, you sumbitch, but I do. Hear that? I do.”

  I had to shake him awake to get more directions. When I turned into the asphalt drive, he was asleep again. It was a cement-block house, one story, white with pink trim, a scraggly yard, house lights on, a gray Plymouth station wagon in one half of the carport.

  I turned away from the carport and stopped near the front door. The outside light went on and the door opened and a lean, dark-haired woman looked out through the screen door.

  I got out and came around the car. “Mrs. Holton?”

  She came out and looked at her sleeping husband. She wore dark orange slacks, a yellow blouse, and she had a bright red kerchief tied around her slender, dusky throat. Gypsy colors.

  “Unfortunately, yes. Who are you?”

  “My name is McGee.”

  I had the feeling that it startled her slightly and I could think of no reason why.

  “I’ll help you get him in.”

  She reached and took hold of his jaw and turned his head slightly. She raised the other hand, held it poised for a moment, and then whip-cracked her lean palm across his face twice, very quickly and with great force. It brought him struggling up out of the mists, gasping and looking around.

  “Hey! Hey there, Janice doll! This here is Travis McGee, my ver’ good buddy. He’s going to come in and have a li’l drink. We’re all going to have a drink. Right?”

  As he struggled to get out of the car I took him by the arm and levered him out. We supported him, one on either side, and after we got him through the door, she gave directions in a voice strained with effort. She turned on the light of what was obviously a guest room. We sat him on the bed and he sat with his eyes closed, mumbling something we could not understand. When he started to topple over backward, I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him so that he landed on the pillow. She knelt and unlaced his shoes and pulled them off. I picked his legs up and swung them onto the bed. She loosened his belt. When he gave a long, ragged snore, she looked at me and made a mouth of distaste. I followed her as she walked out. She turned the lights off and closed the guest room door.

  I followed her into the living room. She turned, standing more erect, and said, “Thanks for your help. This doesn
’t happen often. That is not an excuse or an apology. Just a statement of fact.”

  I worked the revolver out of my trouser pocket and gave it to her. “If it happens at all, he shouldn’t run around with this thing.”

  “I’ll put it away and tell him he must have lost it. Thank you again.”

  “May I use your phone to call a cab?”

  She stepped to the front window and looked across the street. “My friend is still up. She’ll come over and listen for the kids while I take you in.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you, Mrs. Holton.”

  “I’d like some air. And you’ve been to a lot of trouble.”

  She went to the phone in the foyer and dialed, then had a brief low-voiced conversation. We went out and got into the car. She asked me to wait for a moment. When the door opened in the house across the street and a woman came out and started across, she told me to start up. She waved and called, “Thanks a lot, Meg.”

  “Perfectly okay, Jan. Take your time, honey.”

  Janice Holton untied the kerchief and put it over her dark hair and fastened it under her chin. From her manner it was going to be a swift and silent trip.

  “I guess what racked your husband up was having some person or persons unknown kill his girlfriend.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she had turned quickly and was staring at me. “I couldn’t care less what … racks him up, Mr. McGee. I feel sorry for the girl. As a matter of fact I regret never having had a chance to thank her.”

  “Thank her?”

  “For letting me out of bondage, let’s say.”

  “Unlocked your chains?”

  “You’re not really interested in the sordid details of my happy marriage, are you?”

  “It just seemed like a strange way to put it.”

  “I find myself saying some very strange things lately.”

  “Right at the bottom of the certificate, Mrs. Holton, there’s the fine print that says you live happily ever after.”

  I suppose that you could call it role-playing, maybe in the same sense that the psychologists who use group therapy use the term. Or you could call it, as Meyer does, my con-man instinct. Okay, call it a trace of chameleon blood. But the best way to relate to people is to fake their same hang-ups, and when you relate to people, you open them up. So I lie a little. Instant empathy. To crack her facade I had to make out like an ex-married, so I spoke with the maximum male bitterness.

  “You sound like you had the tour too, Mr. McGee?”

  “Ride the rolly-coaster. Find your way through the fun house. Float through the tunnel of love. Sure. I had a carnival trip, Mrs. Holton. But the setup tends to do a pretty good job of gutting the husband. I believed the fine print. But she turned out to be a bum. So I end up paying her so much a month so she can keep on being a bum. So I’m a little bitter about the way the system works.”

  “For a girl married to a lawyer, it doesn’t exactly work out that way. I believed the fine print too, Mr. McGee. I considered it an honorable estate, an honorable contract. And, by God, I worked at it. I knew after the first year it wasn’t going to be the way … you hope it will be. So I tried to understand him. I think Rick feels that he is … unworthy of being loved. So he can’t ever believe anyone loves him, really. So he has a thousand mean snide little ways of spoiling things. He loves the boys, I know. But any kind of … family ceremony, something for warmth and love and fun—oh, can he ever clobber everybody. Tears and shambles and nastiness, and everything you try to plan … birthdays, anniversaries, he has such a cruel way of making things turn sour. But I was stuck with it. I thought I was stuck with it. You know, if you’re a grown-up, you add up the ledger. A successful man, a faithful man, not a drunk or a chaser. But then … the sneaky business with Miss Woertz changed the ledger.”

  “And let you out of bondage?”

  “Kept me from agonizing over … making the marriage work. Sort of … canceled all my vows.”

  “Did you find out about her quite recently?”

  “Oh, no. I found out practically as soon as it started. He started that crusade about finding out what really happened to Dr. Sherman. You know about that?”

  “He told me about it. Was that just to help cover up the affair with the nurse?”

  “Oh, no. He’s sincere about it. But when it threw them together, he sure put in a lot of hours in so-called investigation. Somebody called me up and told me about it, in a very nasty whisper. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was true, somehow. Then I saw all the little clues.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “The most convincing one was the way he became so much sweeter to me and the boys.”

  “So are you going to divorce him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t love him anymore. But I haven’t got a dime of my own. And I just don’t know if I could get enough alimony and child support if I bring suit.”

  I turned in at the Wahini Lodge and parked away from the entrance lights, over near the architectured waterfall and the flaming gas torches.

  “You’re too darned easy to talk to, Mr. McGee.”

  “Maybe because we just wear the same kind of battle scars. I had to get out of my setup just as fast as I could.”

  “Any kids?”

  “No. She kept saying later, later.”

  “It makes a difference, you know. It’s a pretty nice house, nice neighborhood, good school. There’s medicine and dental work and shoes and savings accounts. It’s an arrangement, right now. I do my part of the job of keeping the house going. But I won’t ever let him touch me again. It would turn my stomach. He can find himself another playmate. I don’t give a damn. And we don’t have to socialize, particularly.”

  “Can you live the rest of your life like that?”

  “No! I don’t intend to. But I have a friend who says that we … says that I had better just sort of go along with it as is for the time being. He is a dear, gentle, wise, understanding man. We’ve been very close ever since I found out about Rick. His marriage is as hopeless as mine but in a different way. I’m not having an affair with him. We see each other and we have to be terribly careful and discreet because I wouldn’t want to give Rick any kind of ammunition he could use if and when I try to get a divorce. We don’t even have any kind of special understanding about the future. It’s just that we both … have to endure things the way they are for a while.”

  “Then, I guess the family outing Rick told me about, the trip to Vero Beach yesterday, must have been pretty grim.”

  She had turned in the bucket seat to face me, her back against the door, legs pulled up. “Was it ever! Like that old thing about what a tangled web we weave. I didn’t have any idea he’d want to spend any part of Saturday with his wife and children. I’d told him I was going to drive over and see June and leave the boys off with my best friend on the way. She lives twenty miles east of here. Her boys are just the same ages, practically. I’d fixed it with June to cover for me in case Rick phoned me there for some stupid reason. And I was going to drive to … another place close by and spend the day with my friend. But out of the clear blue Rick decided to come too! I didn’t see how in the world he could have found out anything. But he was so ugly I decided he must have had a little lovers’ spat with his girlfriend. When I left the boys at my friend’s place, I had a chance to phone my sister and warn her, while Rick was out in the car, but I couldn’t get hold of my friend to call the date off. Rick was in a foul mood all day.” Again the mirthless laugh. “What a lousy soap opera!”

  I could not leave at that moment because it would give her the aftertaste of having been pumped, of having talked too much. So I invented a gaudy confrontation between me and the boyfriend of a wife I never had. I spun it out and when I was through, she said, “It’s wretched that people have to be put through things like that just because a wife or a husband is too immature to … to be plain everyday faithful. Do you ever run into her? Is she still in Lau
derdale?”

  “No. She moved away. I have no idea where she is now. I send the money to a Jacksonville bank. If I want to find out where she is, all I’d have to do is stop making payments. Look, do you want to come in for a nightcap?”

  “Golly, where did the time go? Meg is a good neighbor, but I don’t want to take too much advantage. Mr. McGee?”

  “Travis.”

  “Travis, I didn’t mean to sound like a long cry of woe, but it’s made me feel better somehow, comparing bruises with somebody.”

  “Good luck to you, Janice.”

  “And to you too.” I had gotten out. She clambered over to the driver’s seat, snapped the belt on, and pulled it back to her slender dimension. “Night, now,” she called, and backed out and swung around and out onto the divided highway, upshifting skillfully as she went.

  I projected a telepathic suggestion to her unknown friend. Grab that one, man. Richard Haslo Holton was too blind to see what he had. She’s got fire, integrity, courage, restraint. And she is a very handsome lively creature. Grab her if you can, because even though there are quite a few of them around, hardly any of them ever get loose.

  No messages, no blinking red light on the phone. The maid had turned the bed down. Small hours of the morning. When I put the light out, a freckled ghost roamed the room. I said good night to her. “We’ll find out, Miss Penny,” I told her. “Somehow we’ll find out and you can stop this wandering around motel rooms at night.”

  Twelve

  I had a hell of a night. Hundreds of dreams and from what little I could remember of them, they all had the same pattern. Either somebody was running after me to tell me something important and I could not stop running from them or understand why I couldn’t stop, or I was running headlong after somebody else who was slowly moving away no matter how hard I ran, moving away in a car or a bus or a train. Sometimes it was Penny, sometimes Helena. I woke with an aching tiredness of bone, a mouth like a cricket cage, grainy eyes, and skin that seemed to have stretched so that it was too big for me and wanted to hang in tired, draped folds.